In recent years, the market for “Print On Demand” (hereinafter, POD) has been expanding with the advent of high-speed, high-quality electrophotographic printing apparatuses and inkjet printing apparatuses. In POD, digital printing using electronic data is performed with maximum utilization of digital image forming apparatuses, such as digital copiers and digital multi-function peripherals. Thus, POD aims to enable handling relatively small-volume jobs in a short turnaround time.
In POD, a printing method known as variable-data printing (hereinafter, VDP) is performed, which takes advantage of the characteristics that electronic data is used. In a VDP document used in VDP, fixed portions and variable portions are specified, and data for the variable portions is supplied from a data source such as an RDB (Relational Database) or a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file. Here, columns (fields) of the data source are associated with variable portions of a template document, and data of the data source is applied thereto row by row (record by record), and thus documents with content in which only the variable portions differ are printed.
Here, XML data is an example of data in a format that differs from the formats of data supplied from an RDB and a CSV file. XML data is supplied from a data source such as an XML file or an XML database. With regard to XML data, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-323813 discloses a technique for associating a specific node of XML data with a document content area by describing the node as an XPath. As another example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-265405 discloses a technique for mapping XML data to a spreadsheet. However, the above techniques are not applicable to a VDP document since the concept of rows (records) of a data source cannot be represented in those techniques.
VDP needs flexibility so that various data sources can be handled and also freely combined, in order to satisfy various demands from users. However, XML data supplied from a data source such as an XML file or an XML database does not have a data structure represented with rows and columns (two dimensions), like an RDB or a CSV file. With VDP, columns (fields) of a data source are associated with the variable portion of the template document, and data of the data source is applied thereto row by row (record by record), and thus documents with slightly differing content are printed. Accordingly, XML data is not applicable to a VDP document if the structure thereof is kept as-is. Further, in the case of combining data sources, an operation of combining columns (fields) and rows (records) of data sources is necessary. Accordingly, it is also not possible for XML data and data supplied from an RDB or a CSV file to be combined and applied to a VDP document.